Every student finds that there is some effort required in order to understand the subject material being studied. Particularly for grade-oriented courses or subject matter, many students seek to achieve a high grade and make the most use of their study time. By efficiently studying, the student may have more time for other activities including recreational and other fun activities.
In studying materials, students may often use notes in order to review and recall the subject matter taught in the classroom. Additionally, such notes may be taken by hand in the review of study materials such as books, texts, and the like. By engaging in processes of memorization and repetition, the student may come to understand the material better, especially when tests are imminent. Many students spend an enormous amount of time preparing study guides, flash cards and other devices to help them study material. The preparation of these study materials is boring and tedious. The student may also give him- or herself (as used herein, the masculine pronoun is meant to include the feminine) a self test so that the student may evaluate himself and his understanding of the subject matter.
Such studying may be considered burdensome by the student. Coupled with sometimes-enforced attendance in classroom lectures or the like, the process by which subject matter may be understood by a student or person may be viewed with dread or dismay as the imposition of artificial constraints force the student to undergo one form of discipline or another in order to achieve understanding of the subject matter. Even students that have the mental make up required to spend the amount of study time needed to get top grades report that they regretted all of the activities that they could not participate in because they had to spend so much time studying in order to reach their learning goals.
All students have a limitation on the amount of time that they can spend studying. Unfortunately, the nature of current study techniques leads many students to spend their limited study time inefficiently. Add to this the problem that it takes a certain amount of time to get study materials organized and to begin studying effectively. This means that if a student only has a small amount of time available that could be used for studying say, 5 to 20 minutes, this time is often not effectively used.
Generally, many people are interested in the world, curious about the different aspects of it, both natural and cultural. Additionally, people often find that the act of studying is not so burdensome save that it requires discipline and diligence. Consequently, it would be of some advantage to the student to provide a system that lessened the burden as much as possible on the student with respect to studying. The subject matter must still be studied, but the process of studying may be one that is made the least burdensome so as to afford the student the greatest enjoyment in studying. By providing an environment in which the student is the least burdened with the act of studying, a spark of interest may be brought to the fuel of knowledge, thereby providing an upward spiral of intellectual activity for the student: the subject matter is interesting to the student which prompts more studying by the student which prompts more interest.
Software systems in the past have been established and made available to students. These often include rote scripts that take the student through a particular course of study or a part thereof. The art apparently lacks a system by which the student may designate the material to be studied and then have the system present to him that material. It would be of additional advantage to have such a system that would allow pre-processed materials to be incorporated by it, so that it might aid the student. It would be an additional advantage to provide such a system that is easily handled by the student and that operates to forward the studying process as much as possible by a machine-implemented system. Finally, it would help the student if the way in which this material was presented was customized, as by machine, to the way that individual student best learned that type of information.
Many students concentrate their study time on memorization. Current study techniques do not encourage students to do associative learning. This type of studying causes the user to think about how the items they are memorizing relate to one another and/or how the information they are studying relates to information that they already know. This type of studying when combined with memorization provides a powerful learning combination as the student not only learns the particular elements of a subject by rote memorization, but also the associative interrelations important to a more complete understanding.
Many people never reach their full learning potential because they can not study effectively. This is bad for the individual and bad for society. The reasons that they may be ineffective at studying could be that they do not know how to effectively study, that the way they learn best does not fit well with normal study techniques, and/or that they have some difficulty like attention deficit disorder that makes it extremely difficult to organize study material and focus on the material to be learned. The present invention compensates for each of these problems and allows students to reach their full learning potential.
Even when material is learned with traditional study methods, it is often lost or forgotten in a few weeks or months. It is difficult for the student to reorganize and relearn the information for a comprehensive examination or for use in a future job where the may suddenly find that they need to remember information that they once learned 5 or 10 years ago in school.